Like most of Wall's books, this one will be best appreciated by devotees of the band, which, given the fact that AC/DC has...
Comprehensive, albeit indirect, retelling of how an unlikely collection of lads road the highway to hell straight into the upper echelons of rock’s pantheon of gods.
U.K. rock journalist Wall (Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica, 2011, etc.) begins where any good history of the seminal band should: wild man singer and all-around-good-time-guy Bon Scott cheating death after a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Alas, even the delightfully and demonically charged Scott couldn't outwit the grim reaper very long, dying soon after that at the age of 33 following a particularly shady night of partying. Not surprisingly, the author devotes many pages to Scott in an examination of the legendary lothario's desperate efforts to make it as a rock singer in far-flung Australia. Wall parallels that rough-and-tumble odyssey with that of a diminutive pair of belligerent brothers almost a decade Scott's junior: Malcolm and Angus Young. According to the author, the Youngs ruled—and continue to rule—AC/DC with absolute, iron-fisted authority. At the time, that forced even the supremely talented and singularly gifted Scott to constantly watch his step—and keep his distance. Nevertheless, the author notes that Angus, the guitar-obsessed problem child in the iconic schoolboy uniform, "loved" Scott. Unfortunately, none of the members of the band participated in the writing, so the author relies on mostly third-party accounts and previously published interviews to get a real sense of the interband dynamic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since the principals in anyone's life story can often be the most myopic. Among the most revelatory items: Angus was hooked on milkshakes, and AC/DC was glam!
Like most of Wall's books, this one will be best appreciated by devotees of the band, which, given the fact that AC/DC has sold more than 200 million albums worldwide, is quite a large audience.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03874-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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